The pens were Grallik’s priority, and he’d use whatever spells he could muster to impede the slaves running amok.
“Damn me,” he cursed under his breath. “Damn me to the bottom of the Abyss for not trying to recast the wards.”
The goblins bolting from the pens all appeared to be heading in a wave to the east, where the bulk of his wards and glyphs had been painstakingly and precisely cast … and obliterated, two days past, by the churning earth.
Steel Town-Hell Town-had gone berserk. Steam spewed up from a wide rent in the earth to the south. Behind him a woman screamed shrilly. A man called to her, then both voices were silenced after a thunderous crash.
Goblins dashed past and around him, terrified shouts mixed with repeated words Grallik couldn’t understand. To the south, in the farthest pen, he saw the mother goblins huddled with their babies. But there weren’t as many as the previous day, when he had helped set fire to the pile of dead goblins. So some mothers had already fled, with or without their caterwauling offspring.
Grallik had always feared the greater number of the slaves. He had had nightmares about the slaves rising up and crushing the Dark Knights, and dread gripped him as he neared the closest pen. There were still plenty of goblins inside, but many others were gone and the remaining ones might swarm him. He nearly stumbled as, again, the quake shook the ground.
The quake … one of the red-skinned goblins had warned there would be another one. The female goblin with the narrow-set eyes. He looked for her as he went, spotting several with dark red skin but none that he recognized.
“They all look the same, damn them!”
He guessed that well more than half of the goblins were already running away from the camp. He’d stop as many as he could using fire. Fire was his best weapon and the only significant magic that came to him instinctively. Reaching inside himself, Grallik searched for the magical spark that would release one of his more powerful enchantments. Closer, though, he needed to get closer. The mass of fleeing goblins was too far away. Just a little closer, he thought, just a-
The ground rocked violently again, and Grallik fell, the spell disappearing from his mind as he plunged into a crevice. Heart pounding in his chest, he flailed about with his arms and called out for his men. But his voice could not be heard over the noise of the earth, and he was drowned out by the shouts of everyone else in Hell Town. His fingers gripped the edge of the crevice, his body slammed against the side, and the air was knocked from his aching lungs.
Grallik’s chest felt as though it had dented from the impact, and his heart continued to pound thunderously. He tried to pull himself up, but the continuing quake made that impossible. His fingers felt numb as he hung on; he could see nothing but blackest night and dark dirt in front of his face. He’d swallowed a mouthful of earth, and spit and spit trying to get the remnants and the taste out.
“I … won’t … die … here,” he hissed. “I won’t! Damn the quake!” Suddenly he was seized by a coughing fit that made him feel lightheaded. “A spell, a spell …” There were reliable enchantments in the precious tome the first quake had swallowed. One, he knew, would have been just the right antidote, making him as light as a sheet of parchment and letting him float above the bedlam and out of the crack of earth. If he could just remember it. But he couldn’t; he needed his spellbooks with their many spells that would have captured the goblins in invisible nets, that would have trapped them in cages materializing out of thin air.
“Damn my addled brain!”
He knew for certain that not a single one of the glyphs and wards functioned. No flames from fiery columns snared the runners. No high-pitched alarms were sounding. A disaster was upon the place, and he, the temporary commander, the wizard whose magic had failed, was to blame.
He coughed again and felt himself slipping, his fingers grabbing at air as he slid down the side of the crevice and landed in a heap at the bottom, painfully twisting his ankle. Grallik had seen some crevices close up, so he did his best to scrabble up the side to avoid the fate of other victims. He forced himself to focus on his magical skills, searched again for the arcane spark within himself, found and nurtured it, sending the eldritch energy into his fingers.
“Like fire,” he breathed. “Be like fire.”
Grallik felt his fingers grow warm and sink into the dirt, giving him a better purchase. It was one of the simple enchantments he used to heat the rocks and leech the ore. He used it to heat his fingers so they could bore into the hard earth. Using the spell in that manner was painful to his flesh and reminded him of his youth when he was burned in the home fire. But dying would be more painful … and eternal.
With great effort, he began climbing and soon climbed high enough to poke his head above the crevice. A moment later, the rumbling abruptly ceased, and the earth began to fill up the hole beneath him. He struggled over the side, rolling away just as the ground heaved and settled again. Then he forced himself to his feet, crying out when he had to put weight on his twisted ankle. His ankle might be broken, he realized, but he must walk on it. He had to force himself.
“The slaves …” Above all, they were Grallik’s priority. In charge of Hell Town, he couldn’t afford to let any more of them escape. The camp could not function without the goblins. The stain on his career would be permanent.
Suddenly, he felt a renewed purpose. He felt revitalized. He stoked the magical furnace within himself, calling another fiery spell to mind, a cruel but useful one.
“No farther!” Grallik shouted at the slaves as loud as he could. In the same instant, he released the magic, calling up a sheet of flame that rose at the edge of Steel Town and cut through the wave of running slaves, instantly roasting a dozen of them and sending others scattering in a panic.
Grallik didn’t enjoy killing the slaves; if nothing else, he sorely required their future labor. The camp didn’t need any more charred bodies. But if he did nothing, they all would escape, the camp would wither, and the failure would be his.
The stench from the burning goblins filled his senses, and he had to fight to keep from retching. He coughed harshly as he concentrated on making the wall of fire longer and higher, stretching south to the pyre of corpses, joining with that fire, and turning the area into an inferno.
“I said no farther!”
The wall lit up the whole camp, revealing the scale of the destruction that Steel Town had suffered from the second quake. Nothing stood, not a single wall or post. A cloud of dust, bigger and higher than that from the first quake, shadowed all the knights and laborers who were picking themselves up and shuffling around the camp. Grallik imagined that was what the Chaos War in the Abyss must have looked like.
“Hell,” he said. “Hell’s come to Neraka.”
The fire wall continued to blaze, holding hundreds of goblins back and keeping them from joining their fellows, who were racing away on the other side of the conflagration.
Tears streamed down the wizard’s face from the acrid scent of burning bodies and the billowing dirt and the death- and dust-choked air. He glanced over his shoulder: not even the rubble of his workshop remained. All of it had been swallowed up by the angry earth. The mountain path, which he could see illuminated by bright starlight, had great gaps in it, as though a huge beast from below had clawed at the rocks and cut deep swaths in the path. The three entrances to the mine had disappeared, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.
He turned back to his flaming wall and limped in that direction. In the crush of goblins, he saw one of the Skull Knights thrashing about violently. The priest was grabbing slaves and pounding on them with his fists. Grallik spotted two other knights on the ground near the priest, and as he drew closer, he could tell they were drenched in blood, probably dead.